Hey, Washington Republicans!

You've watched a substantial surplus turn into record-breaking deficits, and you have two wars currently in progress, and an entire region including a major American city struggling to recover from natural disaster! Whatcha gonna do?!

If only the answer was, "We're goin' to Disneyland!

WASHINGTON - Striving for a badly needed congressional score, President Bush urged Congress Wednesday to pass a multibillion-dollar bill extending tax cuts for businesses and families, especially at a time of soaring gas prices.

“A tax increase would be disastrous for business, disastrous for families and disastrous for this economy,” Bush said.

Republicans on Capitol Hill already had reached agreement in principle on a $70 billion tax relief package that would extend tax cuts on dividends and capital gains...

Of course, back under President Clinton, business, families and the economy were doing just fine paying taxes at the rates that Bush cut, so 'disastrous' might be an exaggeration.

And do we really, really need to go through the whole rigamarole about how, when Congress enacted the tax cuts, enough of them were dubious about the whole "tax cuts will bring in more revenue" math that they purposely time-limited them, just in case it turned out the math was wrong, which it was? And that that was before the wars, or the hurricanes, or threat of bird flu, etc. etc?

And do we really need, yet again, to go into how the benefit of the tax cuts they are trying to extend went disproportionately to the very wealthy, just as critics said they would and the adminstration kept denying?

I'm afraid so.

Couldn't we just send them to Disneyland?